The Grade 9s at Glenforest Secondary School would cheer when student teacher Miss Zaazou, a pint-sized math whiz with a 100-watt smile, let them use their smart phones for math games to review what they’ve learned.

It was also Miss Zaazou, a calculus crackerjack, who helped the Mississauga students prep for the Grade 9 EQAO math test.

And there was Miss Zaazou again, a budding painter with a taste for psychology, this time teaching the Grade 11s about world religions.

But they were all different people.

There have actually been three lively, math-savvy “Miss Zaazous” training to be teachers at the University of Toronto’s Mississauga campus — all born of the same Egyptian parents 22 years ago, minutes apart, and each posted at Glenforest during their program.

Now graduates Nisreen, Nourhan and Nirvana Zaazou are triplets keen to be teachers — despite a grim job market where more than one in three rookies can’t find work.

If the job hunt for new teachers is scary, this family faces a triple threat.

Yet the sisters say they have their eyes wide open.

“Some people say it takes about eight years to get a full-time job at a public school — but we’re patient, because it’s what we all really want to do,” said Nisreen, who graduated in June with her kid sisters (she’s the oldest by two minutes) from the concurrent education program, in which students get a teaching credential over five years while earning a bachelor’s degree in something else.

In all three cases, their major — the subject they are best qualified to teach — is math.

“We all love math,” said Nirvana. “It comes naturally.”

Perhaps that’s not surprising for siblings whose father is a pediatrician and whose mother was a civil engineer before she began teaching at the Abu Dhabi school where her daughters were enrolled until the family moved to Canada in 2006.

“People told us five years ago there’s always a demand for math teachers — but now, we’re not so sure,” admitted Nisreen. “If we can’t get a job, we can always start our own math tutoring business.”

It’s one of the options facing many of Ontario’s 9,000 newly minted teachers, who are competing for the roughly 6,500 jobs that come open each year in a school system pummeled by declining enrolment and tight budgets.

There are so few teaching jobs now that Ontario has decided to cut its teacher production in half. As of September 2015, the province’s 13 faculties of education will take in a total of 4,500 students, half the usual number, and train them over two years. It’s not clear how the concurrent programs will change.

“But the concurrent program is a great way to get your training; five years gives you lots of opportunities to see if you really like teaching,” said Nourhan, whose chemistry chops weren’t quite strong enough to make it her second “teachable” subject (unlike her sisters), so she took psychology instead and enjoyed it so much she may consider doing a master’s in psychology if teaching options dry up.

But none of them will give up the teaching dream easily. They believe young teachers have a way of relating to students that older teachers may not, even if it can take time for rookies to establish a chain of command.

“I had one Grade 12 math class that was mostly boys, most of them taller than me, who used to keep talking for ages after I came to class and sometimes even talk about me in front of me — and then they’d say, ‘Miss, we love when you get angry,’” recalled Nisreen.

“For the first two weeks I tried just being strict, but that didn’t work, so I tried other approaches, including telling them, ‘I may be a student teacher but for the next eight weeks I am your teacher, and I’m actually the one who’ll be marking your tests.”

That got their attention. Slowly they developed such good rapport, “it ended up being my favorite class.”

For now, like most of their fellow teaching grads, they will keep checking the school board website for postings and apply to private schools and maybe, in Nourhan’s case, ponder teaching English abroad. Nisreen has a part-time job as a teaching assistant for first-year calculus at the U of T Mississauga campus.

“But we’ve known we wanted to teach for a long time,” said Nourhan, “since we would visit my mom after class and see how much she loved teaching.”

The Star will check in on the Zaazou triplets this year to see how their job hunt progresses.

More on thestar.com

We value respectful and thoughtful discussion. Readers are encouraged to flag comments that fail to meet the standards outlined in our
Community Code of Conduct.
For further information, including our legal guidelines, please see our full website
Terms and Conditions.